– The pitching staff's repeated implosions in spring training this month, causing General Manager Kevin Towers to demand that his scouts search for power arms.

No front office, scouting or analytical staff could have weathered that 12-month onslaught without some rents in the fabric.

But the din from Padres staff and evaluators has reached many ears in the business. Familiar complaints resurfaced that the Padres, in the amateur draft, have undervalued athleticism, speed and power arms. The tiresome debate between the merits of statistical and scouting analysis bubbled forth. Easily heard, too, were opinions that the front office was too large and too expensive, and that, before 2008, Padres draftees got preferential treatment over foreign players such as Joakim Soria and Jose Ceda.

Idle chatter? Or substantive issues?

Three Padres insiders were asked what they thought – and promised anonymity for their answers.

One said any dysfunction is temporary, likely overstated and wouldn't be a subject if the team could revert to its winning ways of 2004-07.

Another said Alderson created an unwieldy executive structure that sowed confusion and turmoil when he had Executive Vice President Paul DePodesta report to him instead of to Towers, a longtime GM, upon Alderson's hiring of DePodesta in July 2006.

“Paul is really a bright guy and a nice guy, but it's just been an impossible situation,” he said. “It was a train wreck waiting to happen. You have all these different groups reporting to Sandy, and it's created all this division. Grady's looking over his shoulder at DePo in the draft. It's hard to know who makes the decisions. At the end of the day, Sandy becomes GM.

“I don't think there's a real bad guy in the bunch. It's a dysfunctional organization. It's dysfunctional by the way it's organized.”

Another official said he believes that, under Alderson, the club's evaluation of players had tilted too far toward statistical analysis. He said many Padres scouts feel powerless.

“Look, I believe the statistical information definitely has its place,” he said. “But the pendulum went too far. We're making decisions on almost 95 percent of what the numbers say and only 5 percent of what the evaluators see. We've been signing guys who our own scouts say are non-prospects.”

A counterpoint to that view is that the Padres, with zero statistical input, guaranteed $5.5 million to foreign amateurs in 2008.

And Moores, a self-described computer nerd, painted a different picture last March, gushing admiration for Alderson's emphasis on dispassionate, empirical analysis.

“The days of having a bunch of guys who are former players in charge and saying things like, 'I like the way he throws,' or 'I like his confidence level,' I think those days are over,” Moores told The San Diego Union-Tribune then. “That stuff is important. You can't run the game with a bunch of quants from MIT. But you have to do both.”

In that interview, Moores said, “Alderson is a guy who believes in a process, and he's done a very good job with it. Things are not done in an ad hoc manner here like they were before. They're measuring stuff that wasn't being measured before, and that goes all the way to the farm system, but also the big league level. We have some first-rate analysts that pore over numbers. We're in up to our eyeballs in numbers.”